The present invention relates to an apparatus for regulating the orientation of containers, such as glass bottles or like articles, during transport; more particularly to a method and an apparatus by which articles such as glass bottles of a square, polygonal or elliptical cross section are regulated to a specified orientation and then sent out by mechanically detecting, during the transport of the articles, the end of a screw thread formed at a definite position of the mouth of each article, the thread end thus serving as a mark for the detecting operation.
Such glass bottles or like containers each bear a printing, label, pattern or different patterns on its surface or on several planar surfaces thereof. When wrapping or packaging these articles automatically, it is desired to regulate them to a specified orientation and thereafter feed them to a wrapping or packaging apparatus. Generally, however, the articles are conveyed in random orientations, and there is a need to manually regulate the orientation of the articles on a conveyor for the subsequent wrapping or packaging operation. Thus the manual procedure is a bottleneck in effecting a full-automatic wrapping or packaging operation.
The glass bottles or like containers are formed around their mouth portions with a screw thread for screwing the caps thereon. Since the screw thread is formed integrally with the glass bottle when it is molded, the ends of screw threads on bottles of the same kind are positioned approximately at a definite position even if they are made in different lots.